When e-retailer B&H Photo, Video and Pro Audio decided to focus on selling to other businesses a few years ago, the retailer asked some of its customers for advice on how to grow its b2b sales. Taking their advice, B&H started contacting buyers though an online b2b network and within the past two years has grown online b2b sales by more than 100%, says Barry Eisenberg, manager of business development, contracts and procurement.B&H, No. 165 in the Internet Retailer Top 500, still does most of its sales to consumers, topping $100 million in 2011. It sells some 300,000 consumer electronics products, ranging from professional-grade cameras and audio equipment to personal computers, studio lighting equipment and binoculars.But after setting up a profile on Ariba Discovery in the second half of 2011, B&H quickly added “hundreds of thousands” in new b2b sales by lining up interested buyers, Eisenberg says. He declines to specify B&H’s total b2b sales. Ariba Discovery is a business-matching service delivered on the Ariba Network, a b2b trading network used by nearly 1 million buyers and sellers to connect and collaborate.

In the past B&H had prospected for b2b customers mostly through mailing or e-mailing thousands of pitches to potential buyers on industry lists. But it would take hours of staff time to sift through replies to find and match buyers with the right products.Today a dedicated staff spends about 20 minutes each day viewing up to about 10 customer leads in Ariba Discovery, where potential customers can view B&H’s profile with its full product catalog. B&H staff can respond within minutes through the portal to prospects requesting more information, Eisenberg says.Although 10 prospects a day might not sound like a lot, in the b2b world it can quickly add up to a large new source of sales from steady repeat customers dealing in high volumes, he says.

Yes, 70% of Pinterest users are female, but as Michael Silverstein explains in his book “Women Want More: How To Capture Your Share Of The World's Largest, Fastest-Growing Market” —a book on which I collaborated, and so I might be a little biased —, women control $20 trillion (yes with a T) of the world’s consumer spending. Not only are their income earnings growing exponentially, but they also make the majority of the purchasing decisions for the household. Simply put, “Women are the most powerful consumers in history.” They not only make purchasing decision on apparel, household items, food, and education but also in cars, healthcare, financial services, electronics, phone services, and so on. It’s amazing that more companies in these latter categories haven’t even considered looking at Pinterest as a marketing vehicle… and they may just be missing a huge opportunity!

A little more than a year ago, executives from online jewelry retailer Blue Nile Inc. began noticing that a wide swath of consumers were spending a lot of time on Pinterest, the social network where consumers can ‘pin’ and share favorite products and images from around the web.Looking at what consumers were doing on the platform, the executives noticed that many shoppers were using the social network to mark or organize milestones by, for instance, pinning dresses, flowers and jewelry that they could then use for inspiration when planning their nuptials. On Pinterest, consumers add their pins to boards, which are organizational tools used to group pins together around a particular theme—for example “Wedding planning.”To Blue Nile, No. 71 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, Pinterest represented a prime opportunity to showcase its products, particularly since consumers were already pinning its products on the social network. The retailer launched its presence in February 2012 and began highlighting its offerings via boards like “Wedding hair & earrings” and “Mother of the bride gifts.”The only problem with Pinterest, says a Blue Nile spokesman, was that it didn’t offer retailers analytics tools that would enable it to dig into what shoppers were pinning and interacting with. So while the retailer could see that, say 1% of its site traffic stemmed from shoppers clicking on items pinned from its site, it couldn’t tell which items those were.To get that type of information it began to work with social marketing analytics vendor Pinfluencer (the vendor has since renamed itself Piqora) last July. The vendor enables the retailer to track and measure which pins consumers respond to, which has helped the retailer better use the platform, the spokesman says. It also offers tools that make it easy to launch contests, he says.The retailer used Piqora’s tools to launch a Valentine’s Day promotion aimed at gaining followers, which is important because the brand’s presence on the platform is still new, the spokesman says. To enter, consumers had to follow the retailer on Pinterest, then re-pin three diamond rings from Blue Nile’s “Be My Valentine” board to one of their own boards for a chance to win a ring that typically sells for $900. The eight-day contest netted the retailer about 5,000 new followers, which is 233% more than the roughly 1,500 new fans it gains during a typical eight-day window, the spokesman says. And the retailer’s pins were re-pinned more than 50,000 times, which exposed hoards of shoppers to the brand, he says. That’s because when a consumer logs on to the social network she sees the items that her friends on the platform have pinned or repined from another user’s board.